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The Berkman Center for Internet & Society invites you
to attend "Introducing Technorealism: A New Way to Think about Technology,
Politics, and Culture," Thursday, March 19, 3-6 pm, in Ames Courtroom, Austin Hall, on
the Harvard Law School campus. There is no fee to attend the event, and preregistration is not required.

A dozen leading technology critics --
authors of acclaimed books, and leading journalists, editors, and
commentators -- will discuss their collaboration on a set of principles
that challenges the conventional dichotomy between cyber-utopianism and neo-Luddism.

For too long, public discussions of technology have been reduced to
simplistic extremes: Are you for it -- or against it? Will it save society
-- or destroy it? This panel will seek to articulate technorealism, a
more nuanced and useful way to think about the changes that are occurring
in computing and communication.

Technorealism is not a top-down
philosophy, but rather a way of talking about a set of principles that many
people already share. Yet, predictably, this view has been ignored by
pundits and politicians who sensationalize technology with breathless tales
of either high-tech doom or cyber-elation. Technorealism deflates myths
such as the idea that technologies are neutral. Or that information is
knowledge. Or that government has no role to play on the electronic
frontier. Or that wiring the schools will save them.

There's been much hand-wringing recently over the Matt Drudge phenomenon --
the idea that journalism's Big Media gatekeepers now face competition from
any muckraker with a modem and moxie. News observers have been quick to
belittle -- and even to demonize -- webzines, email lists, and other
nontraditional online information sources. At the same time, some
cyberspace denizens have professed their intent to ignore the basic
components of traditional journalism.

This panel of leading journalists and editors (all of whom have worked
in "old" and new media) will discuss a
more subtle and accurate way -- a technorealist way -- to understand the
possibilities and limitations of online communication, whether it be chat
rooms, Drudge, or Microsoft's Slate. The panelists will also look more
broadly at the social and political potential of new media, from
interactivity to identity exploration to using the Internet as a tool for
global organizing.